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Canadian politician Margaret Commodore is used to speaking to large groups of people but admits after talking publicly for the first time about the abuse she suffered as a child in a Port Alberni residential school she couldn’t help but break down.

“I won’t apologize for my tears. I deserve them,” the former Whitehorse MLA told thousands who attended the opening sharing session of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Vancouver Wednesday.

The Commission is holding seven national events across Canada to give former students and their families an opportunity to share how their lives were touched by residential schools and guide a process of reconciliation between aboriginal people and non-aboriginals. Indian residential schools date back to the 1870s and between then and 1996 — when the last one closed — approximately 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children were taken from their families and placed in church and government run schools, where many students suffered emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse.

“When I think of it I feel sadness and pain,” Commodore said. “Reconciliation is a big word. What does it really mean? Does it mean we have to forgive? Does it mean we will get over it? We never really will get over it ... I have forgiven most people in my life but to this day I have not been able to forgive my abuser. I can’t do it. I was just a little girl.”

Commodore, who was supported by her two daughters who flew down from Yukon to be by her side, said her third daughter wasn’t there because she couldn’t emotionally handle hearing about the abuse Commodore suffered. She added this was the first time her other daughters would have heard the details of what happened to her, beginning when Commodore was eight years old and lasting until she was 15 and finally able to leave the school in 1947.

“When you are raised in a school with 200 other people you don’t know how to be a parent. It wasn’t a normal thing,” said Commodore.

“The hardest thing I had to do was to think of the dysfunction I imposed on my children and it made me really angry that no one ever taught me how to be a parent.”

In an interview, Commodore’s daughters, Sheila Joe and Trace Joe-Caley, said they consider their mother a role model and believe she was a good mother.

“She was always involved in politics and very busy but she was always there for us no matter what,” Joe said.

Commodore said despite not graduating from high school she was able to make a life for herself and have a successful career with “a lot of determination.”

She served as an MLA for the New Democrats for 15 years beginning in 1982, and she was the first woman in Canada to be elected as a Minister of Justice. She also was appointed Minister of Health and Social Services and the Minister responsible for the Women’s Directorate during her career.

“I was a very ambitious person. I moved along and did things I was supposed to do. I used to listen to people talk about residential schools and I was one of those people who said, ‘What are we talking about? It didn’t appear to affect me.’”

But years later Commodore said she went to see a display of artist Jim Logan’s photographs depicting scenes of residential school life and when she returned to her ministerial office she collapsed.

“There was a reaction that happened to me that was so totally unexpected. I was walking into my office and I turned my chair to the wall and started crying. The tears fell and they fell for a very long time. It was then that I realized what happened to me was not normal. I realized how naive I had been. How I was in so much denial,” she said.

She said that was the moment of her healing journey. She credits healing treatment programs like the one offered by the Sto:lo Nation in Chilliwack, which is where she was born and where she returned in 1996.

“You can’t just go there once (to a treatment program) and expect the pain to leave. You have to do it more than once ... When you carry the pain as long as I did it’s harder to get rid of it. My healing goes on and it will last for the rest of my life.”

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Former MLA shares tale of residential school abuse (with video)

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